India bans TikTok, WeChat and Xiaomi apps amidst rising tensions with China

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The Indian Government announced that it has banned 59 mobile applications, together with TikTok, WeChat, and Mi Community.

The reason being, as stated in a press release, the Ministry of Information Technology “has received many complaints from various sources including several reports about the misuse of some mobile apps out there on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India”.

There have been a number of reports from the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) that these mobile apps are a risk to national security and threat to the privacy of Indian citizens.

The Government of India determined to disallow the usage of certain Apps, used both by mobile and non-mobile users.

Looking on the list, we see predominantly service apps which are marketed in India as must-haves – a file explorer, document scanner, RAM cleaner, an independent sharing service, but no major platforms with in-game purchases like PUBG, for instance. Nevertheless, platforms by major Chinese firms weren’t spared – we see Baidu apps, Alibaba’s UC Browser, and Tencent’s ecosystem of QQ apps.

Amongst smartphone manufacturers, Xiaomi is the only firm with some of its apps being banned, there is nothing on Huawei, even if the Shenzhen company is having massive issues with the US government.

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That is probably a political move and a stance in opposition to China, following the border stand-off in which 20 Indian soldiers were killed.

In the mean time of writing this article we tried to download some apps from Google Play and run others that were already installed, and they all worked effortlessly, raising the question how is the Indian Government planning to implement this ban.